I have my fingers in many pies:
IT/techie/charity/non profit/nptech/mission stuff. Founded 2004

Many Pies

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

So what does Wycliffe actually do?

I've been thinking about how to present what Wycliffe UK (aka Wycliffe Bible Translators UK) does to the world. As I'm not a marketing/PR/communications person you're not going to get a polished answer, but my thought processes. One of the reasons for thinking about this is because of the recent change ("Vince's change") that Google introduced recently in the way they work out what to give you when you search. It's a problem because we aren't as high in the search results for things like "bible translation uk" as we used to be

The thing is, although our aim is to translate the Bible into every language that needs a translation (with partners, to start by 2025), in practise not a lot of our people are actually doing translation. The best people to translate a language are those that have it as their mother tongue, and we can help the process. So when we're recruiting we need a lot of other skills other than just being good at learning a language and then translating.

As well as the Google problem the other thing that got me thinking was our weekly "Centre fellowship" at which we heard from people who work on what we call "Scripture Use" worldwide. One of the reasons we do more than translation is that our aim is transformed lives, and a translated Bible can't change anyone if they can't read it (so we do literacy work). Other materials also help people with the Bible, like Bible reading notes, songs etc. Developing this material is part of Scripture Use.

One of the things we heard yesterday was the very practical work of help people who have undergone traumatic events to apply the Bible to their situation, which we call Trauma Healing.

So bringing these things together, our problem (fortunately not just my problem) is that a) we want people who think we just do translation to realise that it's part of a bigger picture andb) we want to present that bigger picture in such a way that when people look for "Bible Translation" in Google, they still find us!

Bible Version Generator

About Me

I am IT Director for Wycliffe Bible Translators UK. I'm also Business Systems Manager, looking after donor management (Raiser's Edge), finance (Sage 200) and personnel (in-house bespoke system). I also have dealings with some of our websites and web-based systems. I'm a programmer by background.